


Belonging

by wisekrakens



Series: Landing Universe [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fallen Castiel, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-04-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 18:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/764356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisekrakens/pseuds/wisekrakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean don’t hunt for four months after Cas’s fall, unless it’s local and they can’t in good conscience avoid it. At first it’s because Dean needs time and peace to heal, but after the casts are chiseled off and Cas starts making cautious noise about taking some place in the human world, it’s to teach Cas the basics of the hunt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Belonging

Sam and Dean don’t hunt for four months after Cas’s fall, unless it’s local and they can’t in good conscience avoid it. At first it’s because Dean needs time and peace to heal, but after the casts are chiseled off and Cas starts making cautious noise about taking some place in the human world, it’s to teach Cas the basics of the hunt.  
  
The mindset and lore aren’t problems. Cas had been an Angel of the Lord, after all. He literally has eons of battle experience and knows That Of Which No Mortal Mind Can Ever Conceive. But Cas has no clue of the smaller things that lie in a hunter’s toolbox: he’s gotten much better at talking since landing a soul and dealing with a painkiller-heavy Dean, but simple things like subterfuge and police evasion fly straight past him and the significance of the salt-and-burn as the hunter’s universal tool and then as quasi-religious funeral doesn’t even register. Dean explains these things once, and then figures he’ll catch the nuances as they come up. Sam answers the rest of Cas’s questions.  
  
Teaching Cas to fight is frustrating for everyone, because in no possible universe does a man used to the absolute power of an open-handed smite appreciate getting knocked down to a punch. This lasts until Dean convinces Cas he’s progressed far enough that putting his skills to some practical test – say, ambushing Sam – would be a useful next step.  
  
The week that follows leaves Sam with several large bruises, Dean with a fat lip, and Cas with both a black eye and his first laughing fit. They don’t stop locking their bedroom doors at night until three weeks later.  
  
Cas learns about guns one weekend just before Dean hacks his leg cast off. Sam’s hunting a ghost a half-hour’s drive away from the bunker; Cas doesn’t ask about the tense lines Dean’s shoulders make as he strips down a handgun, because he already knows the answer.  
  
Garth calls one cloudy afternoon in August. He’s coordinating a hunt for a pair of hunters John used to know – they’d found one hell of a vampire nest a little ways outside Phoenix and figured that, well, maybe they could use some help burning it out.  
  
Sam and Dean look at each other, then at Cas, then back to each other.  
  
“All right,” Dean tells Garth. “Sign us up.”

  


The drive down to Phoenix is long and scorching, because the Impala’s air conditioning broke a week before and Dean hasn’t fixed it yet, and Cas spends most of it sprawled in shirtsleeves in the backseat because Dean hasn’t gotten around to teaching him to drive. He fills their infrequent rest stops with his stretching and groaning, because Dean has taught him quite a lot about the joys of complaining. Sam snores his way through most of the trip; he’d mastered the art of sleeping next to Dean’s half-hysterical singing at age twelve, and despite sliding around in a pool of his own sweat whenever the car turns, he wakes only for food.  
  
They get into town around two and the bar where the hunters are meeting is correspondingly empty. Every head in the place turns when Dean knocks the door open, but only Garth and a half dozen grizzly old men in plaid stay interested after everyone hurries inside.  
  
“Sam, Dean!” Garth calls as he gets up from the corner booth. “I didn’t know you were bringing a friend.”  
  
“This is Cas, Garth,” Sam says. “Cas, meet Garth.”  
  
Garth squints at Cas for a second before exclaiming, “Oh, the angel! It’s nice to meet you, Castiel!”  
  
Carefully straight-faced, Cas pulls at the hem of his shirt – Dean’s shirt, and Dean’s fault, because Cas had never fidgeted with his clothes before coming to the Winchesters – and wishes Garth hadn’t mentioned the angel thing. But then Sam’s pulling Garth aside, explaining if not the circumstances of Cas’s fall then at least the thing itself, and Garth nods sagely.  
  
As sagely as Garth can nod.  
  
“Right.” He nods again. “Got it. Welcome to the fold, compadre,” Garth says with a grin and a bounce that makes Dean wince. But some of Cas’s anxiety dissipates – partly because of Garth’s inherent Garthness, but mostly because of his open-handed welcome.  
  
Having friends is nice, Cas decides.

  


Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who you ask and when you ask them) the other hunters aren’t like Garth. They start in on Sam and Dean (“Hey, Frank, look! It’s the motherfucking Winchester boys!” “D’you think we should bow?”) but see Cas almost immediately as a weak target and swoop in for the kill.  
  
Now, Cas is not a weak target, but he’s also only been human for four months, and he can’t smite the bastards like he might have before, so he tries to ignore them.  
  
Even though Cas can poker face like no other and most of the hunters’ references don’t connect, it doesn't work. In fact, it works so unspectacularly that halfway through the meeting Dean’s forced to step in and chew out men old enough to be his father, and that really doesn’t go over well; but mostly, it just makes Cas look weak. Weak, and like Dean’s girl.  
  
After the meeting, Dean keeps Cas in the Impala while Sam goes to get them a room.  
  
“Cas,” he starts. Then he stops and sighs. “Cas, hunters are not like angels.”  
  
“I know that, Dean.”  
  
“No, I know – I know. But –“ Dean looks out the window, curses complex human social order, and does his nervous lip-lick thing. “Didn’t they teach you about bullies in angel school?”  
  
Cas looks confused.  
  
“They’re… Just trust me on this, okay,” Dean finally says. “You let ‘em get away with this shit now, it’s never going to stop. Got it?”  
  
Cas tilts his head to the side, which has not ceased to be adorable since his change from angel to human. “They can’t – “ he starts to say, before he stops and grimaces, because they can hurt him, now. “Oh.”  
  
Dean nods.  
  
“Fuck.”  
  
When Sam comes back bearing a set of motel room keys, Dean has tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks and Cas is wearing a lopsided smile.

  


They attack at ten the next morning, machetes in hand, and in one hunter’s case, teeth.  
  
The vampires are holed up in an abandoned warehouse. Dean and Cas go in through the back with three other hunters; Garth and Sam are with five others and blast through the main door. This nest is old and well-established, so, naturally, they’re met with the sight of two dozen sleeping vampires as well as three more awake and partying.  
  
A bloodbath ensues.  
  
Hunters in Sam’s group cut the three partiers down, but not before their screaming wakes the sleepers. Dean has the time to grunt at vampiric ability to shift straight into attack mode, and then he’s too busy lopping off heads to play supernatural biologist.  
  
Dean and Sam fight their way to each other almost like breathing; it was stupid, really, putting them in different groups, but Sam had insisted on cooperating with the old hunters after Dean’s feather-ruffling the night before and Dean hadn’t seen much advantage in fighting that particular decree. Cas hovers just out of the range of the Winchesters’ swinging machetes and manages to acquit himself nicely, if not stunningly. He’s beheaded three vampires by the time the first hunter goes down in a gurgle of blood, and four by the second.  
  
A space in front of Cas clears, and through it, he watches the leader of the nest advance on one of the old hunters who’d given him such a hard time at the meeting. He’s staring up at the boss vampire like he knows death has come and he maybe, possibly, is okay with that.  
  
Cas takes the opportunity to slice neatly through the vampire’s neck.  
  
After that, the whole thing is rather anticlimactic. They lose a third hunter before the last vampire goes down, and the hunters that are left spend a good two hours pulling the vampire bodies into a pile and setting them all on fire. Two of the dead hunters had partners -- they take their friends’ bodies quietly off to the desert – but the third had hunted alone, and Sam, Dean, Cas, and Garth stick around for his funeral because it feels right that someone should.  
  
After everything is done, the two old hunters follow them back to their cars.  
  
“You’re all right,” the one Cas saved says, clapping him on the shoulder and making him stumble sideways. “I guess.”  
  
Cas nods, says, very seriously, “Thank you,” and the guy guffaws and ambles off to his own truck.  
  
He doesn’t say anything about it, of course, but on the way back to the motel Cas flops onto the back seat and lets a tiny smile tug at the corners of his mouth. Maybe he’d fit in around here after all.


End file.
